Bank Menatep

Application by Hulley Enterprises Ltd., Yukos Universal Ltd., and Veteran Petroleum Ltd. to take discovery from Alexandra Rutstein for use in legal proceedings in the Netherlands, filed at the U. S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. Note: This document is 312 MB in size and will take several minutes to download.

As a Russian court prepares to issue a verdict in the tax evasion trial of Russian mogul Mikhail Khodorkovsky, documents show that his Menatep holding company and Yukos Oil shorted Russia of billions of dollars in taxes by using shell companies for transfer pricing.They also allegedly cheated minority shareholders. A U.S. lawsuit is charging that Yukos auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers knew of the false invoicing scheme and failed in its duty to report it. Documents obtained by OffshoreAlert, but not cited in the suit, indicate that PwC knew of Yukos' offshore marketing structure, called "Jurby Lake," which used Menatep shell companies in Switzerland, Liberia and Dublin to sell Yukos oil.

A business group headed by Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who was arrested in October for allegedly defrauding the state of $1 billion, stashed money in offshore centers, including Switzerland, Luxembourg, the British Virgin Islands, the Seychelles, Panama and the Bahamas, according to Yelena Collongues-Popova, who worked for one of Khodorkovsky's associates. Lucy Komisar, a New York investigative reporter who is writing a book about the offshore banking and corporate secrecy system, interviewed Collongues-Popova. This is her story.